After the goalless draw between Bayer Leverkusen and Borussia, we have the reactions of Florian Neuhaus, Moritz Nicolas, Marvin Friedrich, managing director for sport Roland Virkus and the two head coaches.
Florian Neuhaus: We’re really happy with the draw, which was definitely a bit lucky on our part. Leverkusen had nearly 30 shots and that’s obviously far too many. We wanted to sit deep, but Bayer did incredibly well in the opening stages. It took a while for us to get out of our own half. We then had a good chance through Luca Netz, but Leverkusen were very dominant overall. A few more phases of possession for us would have been good, but we gave everything defensively and put a massive shift in. We’ll happily take the point and travel back to Mönchengladbach satisfied.
Moritz Nicolas: We’re incredibly pleased that we’ve managed to take a point from this game. Bayer have a huge amount of quality, so we’re very happy with the draw. It’s always the holy grail for a goalkeeper to keep a clean sheet. I’m particularly pleased with that. We wanted to stay compact and close the space so as to not let Leverkusen mount attacks. It’s also obvious that you won’t be able to have control over this kind of team for the whole 90 minutes. But at the end of the day, it’s finished 0-0, which we’re very satisfied with. Next weekend, we’ve got another difficult game at FC Bayern, but it’s also possible that we’ll get something there if we defend this well again.
Marvin Friedrich: We knew that there was a difficult task ahead of us and we’d have to do a lot of defending. We managed that well. We didn’t have much possession in the first 50 minutes, as Leverkusen always managed to stop us with their high gegenpressing. We got more into the game afterwards, but they still threatened us with the ball. We worked well together defensively as a team and battled for 90 minutes. We’ll try to carry that on into the coming games.
Managing director for sport Roland Virkus: I’m very pleased with the team’s performance. You could see that everyone fought for one another. We managed to take home a point because of our good defensive performance. Leverkusen admittedly had more of the game, but only created a few chances in attack. We defended well throughout the whole game and made it hard for them. There were times when we also threatened in attack, but overall we created too little ourselves. In the closing stages, it was to be expected that Bayer would press for the opening goal, but we had the little bit of luck we needed.
Head coach Gerardo Seoane: We knew that we would need an extremely good defensive performance to survive in Leverkusen. We delivered that, so we’ll happily take the point. It’ll do us good after the home defeat to Augsburg. We were forced to play very defensively, but it’s clear that the team accepted that and took on the task even if it wasn’t so fun. We had a great goalkeeper, defended well and deeply. We did concede one or two chances, but this time we had luck on our side.
Head coach Xabi Alonso (Bayer Leverkusen): We put in a lot of effort, but we were often not clinical enough in our finishing. Borussia did well at the back and defended compactly. For us, it’s a shame that we didn’t win, because we did enough for the victory. We weren’t accurate enough in the box. We were missing something in that aspect. We had a lot of control of the game but Gladbach defended deeply. We will analyse this a lot, because we can use the game to learn what we can do better in the future in order to get the better of an opponent that defends so deep. We’re staying positive though and go into the next games with confidence.
